NVIDIA Uses SLI for Physics!

NVIDIA AND HAVOK DEMONSTRATE WORLD'S FIRST GPU-POWERED GAME PHYSICS SOLUTION AT GAME DEVELOPER'S CONFERENCE

SANTA CLARA, CA—MARCH 20, 2006—NVIDIA Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA), the worldwide leader in programmable graphics processor technologies, and Havok, the game industry's leading supplier of cross-platform middleware, will be demonstrating a physics effects solution that runs completely on a graphics processing unit (GPU) —an industry first—at this year's Game Developer Conference (GDC) in San Jose, California (March 21st through 24th).

The result of an ongoing engineering collaboration between Havok and NVIDIA, this new software product from Havok—called Havok FX™—enables the simulation of dramatically-detailed physical phenomena in PC games, when powered by GPUs such as NVIDIA GeForce^(R)7 or 6 Series GPUs and further amplified with NVIDIA SLI multi-GPU technology. The Havok FX product is currently in early release to select developers and is expected to be available this summer.

Both NVIDIA and Havok will shortly be announcing a technology partnership that has resulted in physics processing being done on NVIDIA's GPU's when run in SLI mode. Based upon a driver relatioship with Havoks new Havok FX API, free time for any GPU can now be utilized to assist with physics processing. How performance will differ from Ageia dedicated PPU is unknown at this time, though we should have a solid answer to that before GDC is finished. Until then, we'll pass along this subjective performance slide to tide you over in the meantime.